Good morning, all new printed circuit boards from jlc pcb - and these will enable me to build my new battery. There are 20 pcbs in here, so let's get them out and have a look at them, and here they are cell connect. Now this is probably the simplest pcb i've ever made. There is in fact, just one net on here, one connection and it connects to everything the four holes, the two copper planes on both sides.

There are some vias there to sort of punch through the board, not entirely sure whether they're necessary, but that's it it's just a bus bar. It's a connecting board, there's so little to say about these. In fact that i think i should just get straight on and put them on my battery pack and start building this battery up, so that i can take it out to the shed and use it in place of the bicycle battery. So these boards simply go in this position here.

I've made them slightly bigger you can see, and that is so that they sit on these little plastic ridges on the uh holding pieces, the holding assembly. These were just a little bit too short. These are 60 millimeters by 60 millimeters. So let's place all these on and of course they have to go in the same position as these upper boards and then i'll link the lower and upper boards with little connecting wires.

I've made some of them like that. So there's going to be a lot of soldering today now the reason i've made so many of these is because i might at some point build another pair of rows down at the bottom of this battery. So there'll be another row of these further down. That's why i've made 20.

I wanted to have plenty in stock. I can always buy more of these cells and more of these black plastic holders. So, to start with, this is just an exercise in digging out nuts and washers from here and putting them on these boards. So how has the solar crypto accumulation machine been working? Well, it's been fine, it's just that the um december was a very cloudy month and there were long gaps between days where there was any significant sunlight, and so the gaps between generation of my tuppences have been quite long.

In fact, let's go to the computer and take a look at that so here in pro hashing, i've set up um an account specifically for my solar crypto accumulation, machine and uh. This shows the uh runs of the bit bit main ant minor since november 21st, and you can see here that um there was quite a bit of sun at that time, because some of these blue lines are up in the four us cents: five us cents. Then there are gaps and those are the cloudy days, but december was truly awful gap of four days there gap of five or six days there and a gap of what eight days there with no sun just nothing, and so it didn't mine. That was a one penny mine.

You can ignore these red lines because they are electrical theoretical electricity usage. Of course there is no electricity usage, because this is running purely on solar. I should get rid of these red lines, really they're, not helping and then recently we've had a reasonable amount of sunshine. So we've got uh a mining session every day, again just missed out a day there so yeah, it's not doing too.

I mean it, certainly works. It works there just isn't a lot of sun to turn into electricity to turn into crypto. So when i start using this bigger battery, i think this is about twice the size or twice the capacity of the bicycle battery. That's in the shed at the moment.

It will mine four points or five months every time it runs, but of course it will run less frequently because it will take longer to fill this bigger battery up with juice than it does the current battery, and so i've been thinking. What's the optimum size of the solar panel, the optimum size of the battery and well the ant miner? Yes, i suppose, what's the optimum power rating of the crypto miner, and i think, as far as the solar panel goes well, the bigger the better really there's nothing more to it than that. But the battery is interesting because you could have a very small battery. It would fill up quickly, mine, a short duration of crypto mining and then it would be empty and then of course it would fill up again and you could get several mining runs during one sunny day.

So i'm just starting to think now. A huge battery bank isn't really necessary. In fact, i've started to think of this sort of in terms of a capacitor. It's not a capacitor, of course, but if we think about how capacitors work, they they're temporary, short-term storage of electricity of energy, but they also do other things like filtering and timing, creating timing intervals.

Now the ant miner takes about a minute to two minutes to boot. Up before it actually starts mining, so if we had a battery that only stored one minute of solar energy, then the ant miner would forever be booting up and would never actually do any mining. So we need enough energy storage to have a mining run. That is sufficiently long that the small amount of time taken to boot, the miner up becomes insignificant, perhaps one percent.

So if we had say one minute to boot, the miner up and a hundred minutes of run time, we'd have 99 minutes of actual mining. So, on that basis of having the boot time be about one percent of the total storage period of the battery, then i'm kind of thinking about an hour hour and a half two hours would be optimum, and i think this battery will run that small ant miner. For about two hours, and of course, if i go to a bigger ant miner, i need a bigger battery, but it has struck me that um once i set my solar panel size and the amount of ant mining power that i want to pull. That kind of defines how big the battery needs to be, but it doesn't really need to be any bigger than that.

So those are my thoughts in terms of size of battery. For the moment. Right now, i need to link the top section to the bottom section, because there's nothing physically linking top and bottom at the moment, and i'm going to use link wires for that and i could actually bridge across with other pcbs. Is that a good idea? It would save me having to make all those uh link wires, yeah.

My only concern with this is whether or not this coating actually sits higher on the pcb than the tinning of the pad, and it's i would guess the tinning would sit higher than the solder resist, but it does. I just wonder about how well that contact will make with that contact. If i put the pcbs on there, perhaps i'll start making up some of these link wires and just see how long it takes um. I think i need 16 in total.

Don't i something like that? These are a bit long, really there's a bit of a bend in there unnecessarily long bend. I think i might uh. I think these were something like five centimeters was the length i cut the wire to. I might try cutting it to four and see how that goes.

Well, that's eight little link wires made. So that's that side done. So, let's flip this thing over by rotating it round. It's getting quite heavy, now put it down on there, and here i'm going to need 10 link wires, let's get on with it right.

There are 10 links now on this side, so that's 18 links i've made in total. It took about two hours or something like that. So i think the next thing i want to put on here is the active balancer. Now that's going to sit on the top and i think what i'm going to do is to get the active balance of pcb and have some wires coming out.

The back and some coming out the front to all these various holes here and just sit. It hovering in mid-air above here, and i think this wire yeah this stuff here, which i've got a reel of used it for the solar charge controllers, originally is sort of stiff enough that the board will just sit on the top and shouldn't flop down. Unless this gets very floppy in the heat of summer, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, well, there's some sun on the solar panel at the moment, so this machine might be running, let's check it out. Oh, i think it was - and it's just finished so um, but there is solar energy coming in into those batteries, but it might be a good idea actually to leave them in a discharge state, since i'm going to be decommissioning them now.

So i'll. Take the solar power off by taking this bulb out of circuit, so the solar power is no longer entering the battery. I can disconnect these connections and start removing this battery ready for putting in the new bigger battery right. I've attached the flying, capacitors balancer on the top, and it's kind of just flying.

It's sitting on flying leads, and it's just sort of held up by the rigidity of these cables. Now the light has come on. I heard a couple of sort of pops and bangs well, not bangs, but sort of mild pops. As i was doing, this soldering and bits of wire were touching things and solder was touching things, so i hope it's still working.

It has the run light on, but yes, it's just going to sit up on top of this pack floating on those wires. So i will carry on doing that hope to complete that and get this battery uh balanced on here then i can touch up attach a balancing lead, so i can attach my monitor device. I can see all the voltages and we can see if this thing is being brought into balance, but yeah that's got some good rigidity to it and when all nine wires are on this should be uh. Sat there really unable to flop down.

I'm just interested to know whether high temperatures would make it do that, but for the moment it's looking good i'm going to carry on soldering right. I've got all nine wires on the active balancer. It feels pretty solid up there. If i tip it down, you can see that it sits above the battery pack, just like that, held by nothing more because there are no mounting screws on that thing so held by nothing more than the wires that run down to the individual cells.

The run light is on, although i i felt the solder when i was was soldering get warm because it was touching various points on the battery pack. So i hope this is still working um, but i think that's all about all i'm going to do for this. Video, which was essentially about these boards they're on they're, connected together with these links. So i will continue this in the next video, but for this video cheerio.